US : The global wireless industry is migrating to OFDM radio technology in the wireless LAN, fixed broadband wireless, and mobile phone segments, a transition that will take several years to complete.

Inset is the primary author, Mr. Peter Rysavy quoted below.

That is one of the conclusions of the new 41-page report, Hard Numbers and Experts’ Insights on Migration to 4G Wireless Technology, released today by Rysavy Research and Datacomm Research Company.

“Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing sends data across multiple radio channels, each at a lower rate, combating interference effects that become unmanageable at very high data rates with systems such as CDMA. The advantages of OFDM and particularly MIMO-OFDM in a wide range of applications become more pronounced as the wireless industry moves to higher speeds,” said Peter Rysavy, President of Rysavy Research and the report’s author. “But CDMA, whether CDMA2000 or WCDMA, still has a long way to evolve and it will be several years before vendors must switch to OFDM,” he added.

Hard Numbers and Experts’ Insights on Migration to 4G Wireless Technology provides detailed information on how OFDM technology performs relative to CDMA, its effectiveness in the mobile environment and in what scenarios it will offer advantages over other technologies. The report also quantifies the spectral efficiency of a wide range of existing and forthcoming mobile wireless technologies in various configurations, illustrating the gains from techniques such as receive diversity, channel equalization and MIMO.

Panel of Experts Convened : The study is based on Rysavy Research’s own data plus data provided by leading vendors. Additional opinions and insights are provided by a distinguished panel of experts including Dr. Greg Raleigh, CEO of Airgo Networks; Charlie Martin, Director of Advanced Wireless Technologies, Nortel Networks; Dr. Roberto Padovani, Chief Technology Officer, Qualcomm; Dr. Paul Mankiewich, Chief Architect and Chief Technology Officer of Lucent; Dr. Andrew Viterbi, President of Viterbi Group LLC; and Dr. Sayed-Amr (Sisso) El-Hamamsy, CEO of Wi-LAN.

Additional conclusions found in Hard Numbers and Experts’ Insights on Migration to 4G Wireless Technology:

a. OFDM has inherent advantages over CDMA, but the advantages are only sufficient to warrant migration at high data rates. This report identifies and discusses the cross-over point.

b. Though CDMA vendors are continuing to support and evolve CDMA-based solutions, many are also implementing or reselling OFDM-based solutions.

c. The technical designs of evolved CDMA technologies such as wideband CDMA (WCDMA), High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and 1xEV-DO Rev A are converging. As described in the report, OFDM based systems also use many of the same methods and tools as CDMA-based systems.

d. OFDM and MIMO-OFDM are already key components of advanced and next-generation wireless technologies in the LAN (802.11a, 802.11g and 802.11n), MAN (WiMAX), and mobile (Flarion’s Flash-OFDM) industries.